How we set a price

The Reading Room will cost INR 299 a month. Nothing is open yet, and the number is already fixed.

That order is what I want to explain. We settled the prices before we built the things they pay for. If we set a price after we already know you, we can see how badly you want the thing. I would rather not be able to see that.

Start with what money is allowed to buy here. Three things.

Time, meaning an hour of somebody's attention on a question you brought. Teaching, meaning a class, or a written explanation of how a claim gets checked. Written work, meaning a guide you buy once and keep. That is the whole list, and it is meant to stay the whole list.

Each of those has a quantity that does not move. An hour is an hour whether you arrive calm or frightened. A class runs the same length for the worried student and the curious one. A guide is the same guide on the day you are anxious and on the day you are not. If you become more afraid halfway through, none of these things gets bigger, and none of them costs you more.

Now the two things money may not buy here: a fault found in a chart, and the cure for one. Neither has a fixed quantity. How much of either can be sold depends on how worried the buyer is. If we priced those, our income would rise and fall with how frightened our customers are. No policy survives that for long. Everything that rules out is written down in the refusal list, and nothing here goes on sale until it has cleared every line on it.

The tradition had a different arrangement and it deserves a fair hearing. A rite or a lesson was paid for with dakṣiṇā (दक्षिणा), the offering given to the priest who performed the rite or the teacher who gave the lesson. No board, no listed number. Its size sat between two people who could see each other, and it could be quietly adjusted in a bad year without anyone losing face. I think that is a decent arrangement between neighbours. I also think it stops working the moment the two people are strangers at either end of a website. Neither can see the other. What replaces the visible neighbour is a guess about what this particular person will pay, and the guess is made by the seller, in private, while the buyer is worried.

So the number goes up before the conversation starts. Not at the end, not in the middle, and never after somebody has looked at your chart. People will pay the most at the moment they can think the least clearly. A price worked out during the conversation is a way of finding that moment. Fixing it in advance gives up that money deliberately. That is what the rule costs, and a rule is worth less if the person announcing it will not say what it costs him.

Raman wrote the buyer's half of this in how to choose an astrologer. He would not print a fair price, because any number he named would be wrong for most of the people reading it. He is right. But I am the seller here, and a seller who will not print a number is asking to be trusted twice.

The number is a division

Here is where 299 came from, and it is not a market study.

Bhagol has one revenue target before the main tool gets built: INR 1,00,000 a month. I would rather publish that than have people guess at it. Then the division. Not by the largest audience I can imagine, but by the number of people I think we can look after properly at each level.

- 150 people in the Reading Room at INR 299 a month is INR 44,850. - 40 people in the Study Circle at INR 999 a month is INR 39,960. - 20 one-time guides sold at INR 799 is INR 15,980.

That adds to INR 1,00,790. One hundred and ninety members and twenty purchases in a month.

The smallness is the part that matters. A company needing two hundred people can afford to be calm with all of them, and can afford to turn away the ones who should not be paying at all. A company needing twenty thousand cannot. It has to reach a little further each quarter, and the thing that reaches furthest is fear. I would rather run the small version and keep the standard than run the large one and find out what I would trade for it.

What the numbers buy, when each opens. The Reading Room, at INR 299 a month: a monthly plain-English digest, reading paths through the archive, printable notes and checklists, the source notes behind selected essays, and summaries of the questions members ask. The Study Circle, at INR 999 a month: everything in the Reading Room, one live class a month with a recording, questions collected before the class, and short source notes after it. One-time guides between INR 499 and INR 1,499, priced by length and by how much checking each one took.

None of the three is open today. The essays and their plain-English gists are free and stay free.

One more number, because it is the sort that usually gets left out. Of your INR 299, we do not receive INR 299. A payment gateway, meaning the company that moves money from your bank to ours, charges a standard 2 per cent, and there is 18 per cent GST on that charge. On 299 that comes to about INR 7. Just under INR 292 reaches us. Those are the gateway's standard published rates as I write; if they change, this arithmetic changes with them, and this page will too. I mention it because a company that will not show you its small subtractions has not earned any trust with the large ones.

What sits beside every number

A price by itself is neither honest nor dishonest. What makes it one or the other is what is printed next to it. Four things, on every paid page.

The scope. What you get, in a list, and what you do not get. Written before the number rather than after it.

The limits. What the thing cannot do, in the same size of type as what it can. A guide about choosing an astrologer will not choose one for you. A class about how claims get checked will not check your chart.

The refund and cancellation rules, visible before you pay, in words you can quote back at us. Memberships are the easy case, and the rule that makes them easy is not ours. Since 2019 the Reserve Bank of India has required that a recurring card mandate carry a notice to the customer at least 24 hours before each debit, and that the customer be able to withdraw the mandate at any time, after which no further money may be taken. We will not add a step to that.

The price-change rule. If a number here rises, the change is dated on the page, and it does not apply to anybody already paying the old one.

And no page in this business runs a clock at you. There will be no per-minute rate anywhere on bhagol, which would make your hesitation profitable and my long-windedness a source of income.

One hundred and ninety members and twenty purchases in a month. That is the size of the thing I am asking for, and I would rather print the number than let anyone imagine it is bigger.